


at some distant star

by stormss



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Found Family, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Old Married Couple, POV Alternating, Tenderness, Vignette, this is just....soft domestic moments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27785641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormss/pseuds/stormss
Summary: He remembers it, clear as day: the fragility of the photograph, the fading pencil of the inscription on the back. The words were smudged away, except for two:most beloved.Joe remembers reading it over and over when they first found the album, the forbidden love memorialized forever in scraps of poems and sketches and dried flowers and photos. He remembers whispering it into Nicky's hair, the smattering of freckles over his shoulder, in their mix of languages that no one understands but them.Beloved. Darling. Beloved.The words will never be enough, but he says them anyway, just for the smallest smile Nicky gives him in return.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 20
Kudos: 169
Collections: The Old Guard ▶ Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani / Nicky | Nicolo di Genova





	at some distant star

**Author's Note:**

> hello again! this is just some nonsense i've been messing around with whenever i wanted to avoid online lectures the past month or so. both the title and the lyrics within the fic are from _better love_ by hozier because...well, the man's entire discography suits these two so perfectly. 
> 
> come say hi over on [tumblr!](https://reyesstrand.tumblr.com/)

_Chided by the silence of the hushed sublime.  
_ _Blind to the purpose of the brute divine,  
_ _But you were mine.  
Staring in the blackness at some distant star.  
The thrill of knowing how alone we are, unknown we are.   
The world and to the both of us. _

* * *

It takes mere moments for Yusuf's eyelids to grow heavy; for his body to seemingly sag as he tilts his head back against the makeshift pillow: his coat, fraying threads and patches to cover holes, balled up tight. Nicolo thinks it would be impossible to look away, as the serenity of sleep seems to overtake Yusuf as he doses, the shadowy impression of the leaves overhead flickering across his handsome, golden, beautiful face.

Nicolo draws his knees up to his chest, curling his arms around them. His forearms make a decent enough headrest for his chin as he abandons his task of sharpening their blades— _just for a moment,_ he tells himself, though it will soon become a lie—for the chance of watching Yusuf sleep. Usually their accommodations don't allow for such a graceful sight; he has found himself unable to truly get a fulfilling sleep unless he's wrapped up in Yusuf's arms, and they usually startle awake so suddenly that there is no chance to linger in bed, even as Yusuf mutters his complaints and presses his cold nose to Nicolo's nape. But these moments...these are the moments Nicolo cherishes, never tiring of watching the way the man's laugh-lines smooth out, the way his shoulders lose the tightness of tension from long travels. 

He does not know how many lifetimes they will get. It haunts him, sometimes, that this gift could dry up without warning any day, especially now that they have been together for nearly seventy years, without aging, without any scars—those that they could see, at least. Andromache's words still claw at his heart, her story of Lykon, the way her eyes went distant as Quynh held her hand to her mouth. And so Nicolo does not know how many lifetimes they will get, but he will not let it be easily ripped from his hands. Yusuf's curls fall into his face, and Nicolo thinks, not for the first time and not for the last, _I love you._

* * *

"How did you know you loved him?" 

Nile is always bristling with an endearing youth, an admiring longing. She soaks up knowledge like a sponge and when they're not on a job, lingering in ancient cities and busy metropolises alike, the questions come pouring out. Her initial hesitation is long gone, ever since Joe kept her up until three in the morning once, offering no censoring on his tales of their adventures in any decade she threw at him. 

Nicky cocks an eyebrow at her, and she nudges his ribs with her elbow. 

"I'm not _blind,_ you know," Nile says, gesturing to the space he and Joe had been occupying not five minutes ago, to his own face and the way his eyes seem to soften by degrees when looking at his Yusuf, and the smile he still probably has on his mouth, which Joe had chastely smacked a kiss to before running off with Andy to the market. 

"Without him, I am incomplete," Nicky starts, and Nile throws him that look, the playful _here we go again_ that seems to appear whenever he or Joe get going like this. There's no resentment there, though, only fondness in her eyes that prompts Nicky to continue. "He calms me. He _knows_ me." 

Nile looks at him pensively, astonishingly, as if she's still trying to wrap her head around loving someone so wholly and unashamedly for nine-hundred-years. He thinks back on her own stories of her family, her favourite memory of her parents: the two of them dancing in the living room on what would be their last anniversary together, with only the blue light of the television spilling over them, their shadows tangled together on the wall behind them. 

"I knew I loved him because he always made me smile, and still does," Nicky adds, figuring that sums it up pretty well, though he could talk about Yusuf for hours, for decades, finding it to be the most natural thing in the world; there is wielding his sword and Andy's warmness beneath her hard exterior and Nile's laugh like honey, and there is Joe, always Joe. 

"Sap," Nile says, as if on cue. She grins at him nonetheless, and he finds himself mirroring her, his own smile widening.

* * *

A month later, they're in Bruges, and Nile's taking advantage of their finished recon job to spend her mornings sleeping, and Andy's chasing after old haunts. Whenever they get the chance, they let their days stretch by languidly and without any pressures; reruns of movies they saw in their golden days play in Dutch and they occupy themselves with forgotten books or new journals. 

He's seeking out a fresh cup of tea, and Nicky pauses in the doorway, breath caught in his throat. He smiles at the sight before him: Joe, his Yusuf, sleeves pushed haphazardly to his elbows, the tendons of his forearms moving with every delicate movement of his pencil across the paper. Nicky wants to kiss the palm of his hand, the flex of his bicep, the exposed skin at the open collar of his shirt. 

"Yusuf," Nicky says, hearing the fondness dripping in his own voice. Joe looks up and pushes back from the table just enough; Nicky takes his opening, and moves closer, palms gentle on either side of Joe's face. 

"My love," Joe grins back, curling his fingers into Nicky's cable-knit sweater, which has gone through an endless cycle since the nineties of being Joe's, then Nicky's, then Andy's through most of the new millennium, before becoming Nicky's once more. 

Nicky kisses him, and then when he pulls away to ask him about a tea of his own, Joe just pouts at him. Over the loss of contact, no doubt. Nicky just huffs a laugh before kissing the pout right off his face, smile melting into Joe's as they slowly but surely lose track of time. 

* * *

In the beginning, it had been the small things. 

It was their fingers brushing when they didn't need to when passing a waterskin back and forth; it was waking before the other and digging into their belongings and finding an orange, picked up at the market the day before, and consciously saving half. It was passing that fruit, the smell of citrus tangy and bright in the air, and pressing it into the palm of the other's hand. It was boisterous laughter and the deepening of laugh-lines and the slow gravitation toward each other, unable to stop as if it was a fate willed by the stars themselves. 

"I adore you," Nicolo had said plainly and without warning one dusky morning, his mother tongue most comfortable to him when making revelations like this. 

His face had gone pink, almost as if the words had escaped him before meaning for them to. His face had been deepening in colour, splotchy pink slowly moving down his throat and reddening his ears, the muscle of his jaw jumping as his fingers flexed in and out, and Yusuf had smiled at him, like—like he hung the moon. Yusuf grew up knowing he wore his heart on his sleeve, and it was no different with Nicolo, who had seemingly wedged himself between Yusuf's heart and his ribs, the same spot he'd been killed for the first time. All Yusuf could do was sweep his thumb gently under Nicolo's eye, along the line of his scruffy jaw, press it to the corner of his mouth. All he could do was love him entirely and without pause. 

All he could do was kiss him: his nose and cheek, his eyebrow, his pulsepoint, where his lips were met with a staccato beat. And then, finally, the taste of his mouth, a hand in his own hair, declarations on their tongues.

* * *

There are very few safe-houses that are truly _theirs,_ because they rarely think in terms outside of their family unit. 

When they can afford luxuries, and go through the process of acquiring property like normal people, there has to be a first-floor bedroom for Andy, who has a thing about being the first to action and having all the lines-of-sight she needs, and a general dislike of climbing staircases when she's tired and doesn't have to. As their time expands with Nile—as she learns to bear the weight of a sword, as she learns the shape of Italian syllables in her mouth, as she introduces them to personalized Spotify playlists—they learn more about her likes and dislikes, even those she would never say out loud. 

But as weeks turn into months, they've started refurnishing their homes with good speakers and video game consoles and fantasy books that remind her of her brother; they stock each bathroom with her hair products and the drawers with comfortable jeans and bomber jackets. When she finds out that Joe often re-pierces Nicky's ears when they have downtime, because the holes close up whenever they're on jobs where jewelry might be a hazard, she gets him to pierce her septum like she's always wanted and they leave replacement rings for her, next to her preferred toothpaste. 

Their sixth month comes and goes, where Booker's out and Nile's in, and there's still the gaping absence of their brother. But they find it hard not to attach themselves to Nile, who has nightmares and is now comfortable with waking them when she needs to, and understands that Nicky doesn't necessarily mind when she wets the front of his shirt with her tears as long as it makes her feel better; one time, she laughs so hard she does an actual spit-take over Joe's sordid tales of their lives in Europe in the fifteenth century. They come to _love her,_ as easy as breathing, and when they arrive at the Romeo safe-house in Scotland, and they hand her the framed portrait Joe drew of her mother and brother, she hugs them so tight it cuts off airflow for a few seconds. 

"She's a good one," Joe says, for the hundredth or so time, as they turn down their covers for the night. 

Nicky hums in agreement, tucking a gun between the frame and the mattress before climbing in next to his love. "She'll be the best of us." 

He sits up in bed, not quite tired yet, and pulls a weathered paperback from his and Joe's duffel. They don't have any jobs lined up, while Andy talks things through with Copley in Montreal, and so he's trying to let himself relax, even though London still has them waking with a start from nightmares. Joe doesn't mind, used to it over the years, and just kisses him; it's his own ritual, it seems, kissing his temple and the corner of his mouth before Nicky closes the space between them with a hand to Joe's jaw. And then Joe slinks down the bed so his head's resting on the pillow, still on his side and curved into Nicky, though he just throws his arm over the tops of Nicky's legs. 

Nicky keeps the book propped open with one hand, using the other to slowly card his fingers through Joe's curls. The words on the page quickly become forgotten, though, as his murmured sweet-nothings in Arabic eventually lull himself to sleep, too, nestling into the open embrace of Joe's arms. 

* * *

(The bad days come. The days where simmering anger and a general air of being heartbroken takes over them both. Nile must pick up on it, though she just gives them space; Andy tells them to go for a walk. And so they do, Nicky nearly _tasting_ Joe's sadness. He'd watched it happen—Joe watching the game, yelling at the screen in French, turning to the empty space at his side, his eyes suddenly glistening. 

"Joe," Nicky says, voice dropped down into a whisper even though they are the only two souls braving the whipping winds and freezing rain to walk down to the coastline. " _Yusuf._ "

Joe meets his eyes, and he doesn't have to say it out loud. _Talk to me._

"I—" Joe starts, but he stops, pressing his fist to his forehead. He's sure they're thinking about the same thing: sterile needles and syringes; tipsy nights walking back to the flat in Berlin; Booker talking too loud, boasting his team's win over Joe's; the taste of toxic gas and the bitterness of betrayal. His body language would be unreadable to most, but not Nicky; not Nicky, who knows Joe better than himself, who catches the way his mouth curls downward and his eyes stare vacantly out at the water, his breath stuttering. 

Nicky curls his arms around his husband. _I'm here, I'm here,_ he murmurs in Italian, as Joe sniffs and holds onto him tightly. _We'll figure it out together. I've got you._ For now, the words are enough.) 

* * *

He longs for these moments with Joe. 

These moments where he wakes up first, by the smallest fraction of a second; where he stretches out his legs and feels the familiar press of lips against his neck, the shell of his ear. _Bello,_ Joe's sleep-muddled voice murmurs, right into his skin. As much as he loves his family, he longs for these moments where it's just the two of them; where they can just _be,_ before the weight of the world creeps in. Joe's arm tightens around his chest, trying to keep him in bed longer, but Nicky's restless when he isn't behind the scope of his rifle. So he just tells Joe to go back to sleep, slipping out of bed; Joe groans about it dramatically, but presses his face into Nicky's pillow despite his grumbling, seemingly out again within seconds. 

Nicky is careful of the creaky floorboards as he moves from the bedroom down the hall; he opens the windows as he goes and starts up the coffee machine and uses the bright pink spray bottle Nile bought them in Prague to water the little pots of basil and thyme and sorrel and mint, the hanging baskets and other potted plants that are sprawled out through the apartment. He passes Joe's easel, the lines of sunlight spilling through the window panes, cutting across it in sharp squares of light. Nicky recognizes the familiar shapes of his own face, and he bites back a lovesick smile. 

He starts cracking eggs into a bowl when he feels, rather than hears, Joe come into the kitchen. 

There's hands at his sides, fingers fitting into the spaces between his ribs like they were meant to be there; Nicky just grabs one of those beautiful, paint-flecked hands, and brings it to his mouth, kissing at Joe's palm and the inside of his wrist and over each knuckle.

"Come back to bed?" Joe asks, murmured Arabic into Nicky's hair. "Humour me, hm?" 

Nicky scrapes his teeth against the heel of Joe's hand, soothing it with a kiss milliseconds later. He turns in Joe's embrace, rests his forehead against his husband's as Joe's fingers skirt lower, the ring on his index finger a cool press against his hip. 

They abandon the eggs, and their morning check-in text to Andy, and the rest of the world that isn't their bedroom. All of it can wait, anyway. 

* * *

Joe's fondest memory—one of them, anyways, as it seems to change with every passing month—is of their safe-house in the countryside of Northern Ontario. They'd first gone there after the second World War, when they'd spent years pulling people from ravaged towns and were nothing else but bone-tired; after they fucked off to Central America at Andy's summoning and couldn't return again for three decades to keep away any suspicion, they went back, buying the property from the relative of the women that had lived in the home when he and Nicky were gone. 

When he thinks of this safe-house, he thinks of the photo albums they'd found in the dusty attic. He finds it poetic, that women that had a love like theirs would come into possession of the house when they sold it off in the fifties. There had been one photo, of the women with their grey hair and clasped hands, the image already frail from years of being stowed away. He remembers it, clear as day: the fragility of the photograph, the fading pencil of the inscription on the back. The words were smudged away, except for two: _most beloved._ Joe remembers reading it over and over when they first found the album, the forbidden love memorialized forever in the scraps of poems and sketches and dried flowers and photos. He remembers whispering it into Nicky's hair, the smattering of freckles over his shoulder, in their mix of languages no one understands but them. _Beloved. Darling. Beloved._

The words will never be enough, but he says them anyway, just for the smallest smile Nicky gives him in return. 

They bring Andy and Nile to Joe's beloved safe-house after a close call on a job. They all die, two or three times, in an attempt to block Andy from bullets; she still ends up with a broken wrist and scrapes up and down the side of her face, and she had simply turns to Joe and tells him to get them somewhere safe while she heals. And so they book the flight and Nile calls Copley to tell him they'll need a month or two to themselves, and he doesn't question them, not anymore. 

Nicky throws him a warm, knowing look when they slow the rented car down in front of the farmhouse. It's fitting; Nicky—Nicholas, then, but always his Nicolo—proposed here, once. It wasn't the first and it wouldn't be the last, as they've taken many oaths before: murmured into sweaty skin, salt on their tongues; both of them covered in Nicky's blood, the first time he'd lost multiple limbs and didn't know how their gift might work in this situation; the two of them in a bath that certainly shouldn't have been able to fit two grown men, playful in the pale light; hunkered down under the assault of mustard gas, after they'd both already lost their lives several times in what was supposed to be the Great War; reading together in a sun-soaked room during one of their many month-long vacations they only took because Andy proposed time off first.

Here, though, had come naturally. They'd found the photo albums and were thumbing away thick dust to reveal black-and-white faces, and he'd shown Joe a photo with the face cut out. 

"Hang on," Joe had said, returning to the jewelry box he'd been sifting through moments before, pulling out a locket. He flipped the latch and the smiling face of a woman peered out at them. 

The corner of Nicky's mouth had curled upward, before absently touching the back of Joe's neck. He'd turned back to the album, then, his head buried in it for most of the afternoon; by the time Joe had made their bed and gotten the water to run clear and started on dinner, his love had still been hunched over their photos, delicately reading the details of the inscriptions and poems. Joe had hovered behind him for a moment, glancing down at the moments caught in time—a dog under a large tree, a laughing child with ice cream smeared over their face, a family portrait, _the_ photo that would eventually become dear to Joe's heart—before he'd leaned down to kiss the crown of Nicky's head. 

In Italian, a comfort and a default, he'd murmured: "Dinner is almost ready, my love." 

Nicky had hummed, eyes not lifting from the album. 

"The photos will still be here later," Joe had said, moving his mouth down to Nicky's temple. 

"Look at this one, first," Nicky replied, flipping back a few pages to an array of photos depicting what must have been a wedding—albeit a small one, the back of this very house a familiar sight in the background of the photos. There was a child in the taller woman's arms, and flowers in the hair of the shorter woman, and the next photo shows their hands clasped together with matching rings on their fingers. 

"Beautiful," Joe had whispered. And then Nicky showed him the picture he turned back to so often, _most beloved_ ringing in his ears as he read the inscription for the first time, hunched over Nicky's back. 

He'd lowered himself down enough to wrap his arms around Nicky's shoulders. Nicky, as always, had leaned back into the hold; he'd shifted around to press a kiss to Joe's cheek, before he'd tapped his forearm with his fingers, a silent confirmation he was ready to get up and help in the kitchen. 

Later, sprawled in bed, Nicky on his stomach with his leg thrown over Joe's, face buried in his neck, he'd whispered: "Would you marry me again?" 

"I'd marry you right now, my heart," Joe had promised, running a hand up and down Nicky's spine. "You could ask me a thousand times and I'd always say yes." 

Nicky had kissed just under his jaw, his beard nothing more than stubble; he'd kissed up to his mouth, before he'd grabbed at Joe's arms and pulled them into their usual sleeping position. 

And now, as Joe drops their bags onto the bed they always claim, the house feels familiar, like a living thing around them. They had spent the day dusting and bringing in groceries that should last them at least a week and throwing open windows; Nile grinned at the sight of the X-Box in the living room, already hooked up to the TV they'd stowed here a few years back. Andy was happily dozing in the guest room, that they always absently referred to as _her room_ anyway, since it was right next to the kitchen and had a window that looked out onto the plains where horses once roamed. The photo album was tucked safely in their own bedside table, now accompanied by their own belongings: a handgun and a few of Joe's rings, a book of Arabic poetry that had a spine so cracked the pages were barely held in place. 

"You know, I've been thinking of '83 all day," Nicky says, from where he's leaning in the doorway. 

He looks like a vision, backlit from the soft yellow light of the lamp in the hallway; his hair's longer, curling under his ears, his broad shoulders emphasized by the way he has his arms loosely folded over his chest, wearing the shirt Joe'd had on a few days before because they really don't have a separate wardrobe at this point. Joe smiles and stretches his legs out as he reclines on their bed; he's still dressed and his tired body's screaming at him for a hot shower and good night's sleep, but he's content right now, looking at Nicky. 

"Come here, beloved" Joe finally says, and Nicky's already moving as the words slip out. He closes the door so it's open just a crack, first, before he kicks off his shoes and pads over. Nicky sits next to him, sighing as he settles for the first time in a couple of stressful days. Joe closes his eyes and rests his head atop Nicky's, breathing him in. He hums, and whispers, "Hm, '83 was wonderful, wasn't it?" 

They'd spent the whole year, here, doing absolutely nothing until Andy called them and requested their presence in Berlin. They'd gotten married, in the same way they always did: on their terms, quietly, just between them. 

Nicky hums, under his breath. He burrows into Joe's grasp. 

"I say we don't do anything for a week," Nicky murmurs, fitting their fingers together, resting their clasped hands over Joe's heart.

It'd been tough for them both, this last job. Joe'd caught practically a whole magazine to the chest, and Nicky startled awake from yet another headshot, dragging himself to be there when Joe came back. Nicky's hands had been trembling when Joe woke up, pressed to either side of Joe's face, Italian spilling from his lips: _come back to me, my heart. Please come back._

"For a month," Joe says, sweeping his thumb over Nicky's knuckles. 

Nicky noses along his cheek until they're kissing, Joe's hand gentle as he cups Nicky's face, his thumb moving slowly over the line of his jaw. Nicky pulls back and, his eyes slowly blinking open, he whispers, "I love you." 

Joe smiles into the kiss as he says it back, _I love you so much it feels like my heart will burst._ It hasn't changed, in nine-hundred years, and he has a hunch it never will. 

Nicky finally pulls back for good, and he tells him, getting to his feet, a smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth: "Come on, then, old man. It's time to shower." 

Joe gapes at him, playful, throwing a hand over his heart. He follows Nicky, though, he always will; as they spill into the en-suite, he nips at his jaw and murmurs, "I'll show you old," before pressing him against the wall and kissing him deeply, thoroughly, pouring all the love he has into it. 

They're smiling into it, like always. And there's not much else that matters. 

* * *

_You who'd laugh at meanings guarantees  
_ _So beautifully.  
_ _When our truth is burned from history,  
_ _By those who figure justice in fond memory  
_ _Witness me.  
Like a fire weeping from a cedar tree  
Know that my love would burn with me   
Or live eternally. _

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! comments/kudos make my day <33


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